This invention relates to the automatic recognition of broadcast segments, particularly commercial advertisements broadcast by television stations.
Commercial advertisers are interested in log data showing when various commercials are broadcast on radio or television. This interest stems both from a desire to confirm that broadcast time paid for was actually provided and from an interest in monitoring competitors' advertising strategies.
It would be advantageous to be able to provide an automated method and system for logging commercial broadcast data which does not rely for recognition on the insertion of special codes in the broadcast signal or on cues occurring in the signal.
It is also desirable to provide such a method and system which can identify large numbers of commercials in an economic and efficient manner in real time, without resorting to expensive parallel processing or to the most powerful computers.